The Truth

**{: .break one} ** Foreign correspondent Jack Kelley was forced to resign from USA Today last week after he repeatedly misled editors during an internal investigation into some of his stories, the paper’s top editors said. —Associated Press. **

Good morning. Actually, that’s not true. I’ve just looked at my watch and realized that it’s a few minutes after noon. That’s a lie. It’s early evening. I apologize.

So. Good evening. This isn’t easy for me. Wait. That’s also a lie. Oddly, this is easy for me. I don’t know why, but it is. I very rarely mean it when I apologize to someone. Maybe that’s why it’s so easy.

I’d like to take this opportunity to set the record straight. Perhaps I should start with my name. Which isn’t John Kenney. It’s Donald Twain. Actually, that’s not true, either. Donald Twain is a name I heard in a movie once. My real name is Gig Young. No, it’s not. It’s Babson Jingleheimer-Schmidt. I’m sorry, that’s not wholly true. My birth name is Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza. Was. Before I changed it. I’m so sorry. My name, my given name, is Gink Turtle-Glove. My father was from Belgium. Honest. This feels good.

I was wrong to file my series “Rebuilding Iraq: A Day in the Life of a Mother of Five.” Wrong, too, to make up people’s names and quotes. Especially wrong to name an Iraqi mother of five Mary Ann. And perhaps most wrong to file those stories from Santa Monica.

Not a day . . . week . . . season . . . planting cycle passes when I don’t think about a travel piece I wrote about Vaalbos National Park, outside Harare, Zimbabwe, in which I failed to mention that the park posed a danger for travellers due to rampant kidnapping of foreign visitors. I also failed to mention that Vaalbos is in South Africa, not Zimbabwe. I also failed to actually go to either place, owing to prior commitments as well as to my general lack of interest in the African subcontinent. It is difficult to express the depth of my sympathy for the families of the Nova Scotia Always-Active Seniors Group.

I stand by my reporting of a 1989 piece in which I wrote that the Berlin Wall fell because of “structural damage.” Despite the fact that that was a lie. I stand by both my reporting and the lie. And I apologize for both.

The story that perhaps did go too far was “My Interview with Jesus Christ.” Parts of that story were untrue, though I did strike up a friendly correspondence with Mr. Christ, whom I now claim as a dear friend. Stop it. That’s a lie. And a lie is a sin. Mr. Christ told me that.

It is difficult to say why I lied so often, though perhaps it has something to do with having seen my parents brutally murdered when I was nine years old by a deranged cleaning woman while my grandparents, brothers, sisters, and friends languished in a hospital, dying of cancer, leukemia, typhus, and mumps. Which is not what happened, and I am sorry for even typing those words, though I did like, just for a moment, the way they looked on the page and the effect they had on you. And on the Pulitzer committee. Sorry.

When the wall of lies finally did come crashing down around me, I remember thinking, Can I lie my way out? I know now that my reaction was a cry for help. And, in its own way, for a book contract. I have spent much time in the past few years in the care of a fine Viennese psychoanalyst and believe that I have got to the bottom of my mendacity, a word that the character Big Daddy uses in the play “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” by Tennessee Williams. Who was my uncle.

Know this, my fellow-journalists: without honesty, there can be no trust. Even if the notes you fabricated were very, very convincing. ♦